THE medieval Mystery plays were a way of teaching Biblical stories to an audience who couldn't read and were performed for working people by working people.

So the idea that a musical version of the show, The Mysteries, in South African tongues by an untrained cast from Cape Town townships - most of whom had never set foot in a theatre - should have been one of the hits of the London theatre-scene last year is perhaps not quite as improbable as it might seem.

The notion that godless critics were almost universally foaming at the mouth with enthusiasm over the show, which features God, Jesus, the Devil, fires, floods, death and resurrection, might seem less explicable, though.

Rory Bremner believes of the show that it "really earths you and connects you to the very essence of your humanity. It is the perfect antidote to the cynicism of modern British life."

Now north west theatre-goers have the chance to find out what all the fuss is about when the production visits The Lowry, an event that its musical director Charles Hazlewood says he is "just fantastically excited about.

éThe show just seems to gather more momentum - quite unexpected and amazing as it's not the most obviously populist of shows."

The show, ironically, is the brainchild of two Englishmen. Hazlewood and his business partner Mark Dornford-May are musical and artistic directors respectively of a company called Broomhill Opera who started out performing shows in a country house in Kent before setting up home in the rundown but atmospheric Wilton's Music Hall in London.

A place far removed from the plush West End in the poorest area of London," Hazlewood observes proudly.

Rough theatre

There they concentrated on a "rough theatre" approach to doing things. "Basically, our approach was that we would always find a simpler way of saying something," clarifies Hazlewood.

Their work there, as well as in Durban, brought them to the attention of one Dick Enthoven. This larger-than-life figure is a South African entrepreneur, a long-time supporter of the anti-apartheid struggle and a personal friend of Nelson Mandela (reportedly, Mandela called him within two hours of being released while various world leaders were kept on hold) with a vision for the new South Africa which holds that the three factors that will sustain it are culture, tourism and wine.

With that in mind, he invited the pair to South Africa to mount a series of operas. There, they were smitten by the astonishing well-spring of vocal talent represented by township choirs.

"Singing is part of the culture to such an extent that everyone sings about everything," marvels Hazlewood It's such a normal part of everyone's life that there are probably 200 songs about doing the washing-up - and most people will know them!

"I'd worked in so many countries around the world and I'd never heard music-making like it. The intensity, the sheer belief in what they're doing, puts European music-making in the shade. No-one reads music but their ears are so highly developed that when we assembled our company, I could teach them a tune in five seconds flat!"

Everywhere they held auditions, he remembers, hundreds would show up and "it wasn't people who were desperate to act or sing. It was often people who just wanted a job and we realised we might as well have been representatives of McDonald's looking for waitresses."

They eventually chose 40 performers and the idea of re-tooling The Mysteries, he says, came from the fact that they needed a piece to devise from scratch with dozens of people, most of whom had no experience whatsoever of theatre.

"We needed to find a story that has some kind of resonance, where people would recognize the characters immediately, and that was precisely the function of the original Mystery Plays."

Hazlewood composed the music from his "aural library" of Southern African music. The result, at the London shows, had the audience on its feet, hollering for more. After that the show also had a major impact in South Africa where the group "are fast becoming the new role models, the first heroes for Black South Africans."